At the opening in 2004 we reported the following about the large aquarium Sea Life in Berlin, which burst this Friday and is still leaking:

Spectacular crane operations, technical premieres and superlatives: interest in the world's largest cylindrical aquarium, which at 14.02 meters also has the greatest water depth, has been fueled considerably in recent months.

Of course, the technical manufacturing process of this 120-ton piece of plastic, the largest in the world, is also unique.

In the beginning there was the idea of ​​architect Sergei Tchoban from NPS Tchoban Voss Architekten.

He wanted to give the new building of the Radisson Hotel in the heart of Berlin, in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral, the Palace of the Republic and at some point perhaps the rebuilt palace, something unmistakable and spectacular as a competitive advantage.

Perhaps inspired by the aviary in the courtyard of the New Kranzler-Eck in Charlottenburg, he also thought of zoological things and came up with an aquarium, a special one of course.

The public flocks to the multifunctional building

The Dom Aquarée is a multifunctional building with hotel, offices, restaurants and conference center, eight storeys high, a perimeter block development with maximum utilization of the property.

Nothing exciting in the new Berlin-Mitte.

And yet the audience is pouring, because Sea Life, a leisure attraction with 30 freshwater and saltwater pools dressed up as dioramas, has opened on the ground floor, and the highlight of the tour is the elevator ride through the Aqua Dome.

The huge glass cylinder rises six stories high in the building's atrium, which partly serves as the Radisson's lobby, and can be experienced from the atrium-side hotel rooms, from the hotel elevators, from the offices and from the lofts in the glass roof.

On the ground floor it is jacked up;

There you enter the two-storey elevator (with an inner spiral staircase, also a world first), which floats up inside the cylinder and, when traveling slowly, allows 48 visitors to observe the underwater world.

American technique

International Concept Management (ICM) from Junction/Colorado is the only company that has mastered the technique of building such aquariums seamlessly from acrylic.

Therefore, the twelve individual parts (panels) of the outer cylinder and the three parts of the inner cylinder had to be cast overseas, "baked" into shape, stretched in steel frames and shipped to Berlin by sea.

Unusual precautions then had to be taken on the construction site in order to join the panels, which weighed up to ten tons and were eight meters long.

Logistics and construction work on site were taken over by the Stuttgart construction company Müller-Altvatter.

First of all, a free-standing, 22 meter high enclosure had to be built in the inner courtyard, complete with an escape and rescue concept and building permit.

400 kilowatts of cooling and 1800 kilowatts of heating capacity were installed to guarantee the required 21 degrees Celsius permanent temperature.

In addition, three compressors were deployed, which had to provide compressed air with guaranteed reliability for ten months.

The parts are aligned and fixed at a constant 21 degrees in order to be able to maintain the required tolerance of 0.5 millimeters.